A resume is often an employer’s first introduction to a candidate, their experience, and their skillset. As such, a resume should leave the reader with a concrete understanding of how well a candidate might fit a potential role and why. Writing an effective resume is often “not taught by engineering faculty” and thus can prove challenging to inexperienced students applying for their first professional positions, according to Berdanier. We have found, in our own survey, that over 31% of respondents claim a “level of proficiency with creating a resume” of 3 out of 5 (where 5 is most difficult, out of 1-5), and ~15% claim 4 or 5 out of 5 on our survey. While this is encouraging from a career development perspective, this does not mean that students are comfortable honing in on their resumes for specific jobs and emphasizing their impact in a particular role - these more advanced resume writing skills is what we will focus on below.
When it comes to writing strong resumes, Berdanier suggests that it is more effective for students to be provided with examples of strong and weak resumes, than it is to discuss resumes in the abstract. Therefore, below we share some quick practical tips about strong and weak resume techniques and then provide some video walkthroughs of these techniques put into practice.
Another aspect of today’s job applications process is the existence of automated resume screening services. Mujtaba and Mahapatra note that services such as “Arya, Google Hire, HireVue, and Plum” utilize machine learning techniques to sort through the hundreds of resumes that a company may receive for a particular role. Although techniques like this for resume screening may have ethical considerations and biases to address, what this most immediately means for candidates is that it is important to be clear and straightforward with their description of past experiences, achievements, and education, according to Weed.
The following are techniques employed in strong resumes; these are a combination of this book about resume writing by John Marcus and a report about resume-writing specifically regarding A.I. resume screeners
In the 7 minute video below we walk through an example of how to put these techniques into practice as we improve an existing resume!
Below you will find a Google Doc that can serve as a resume template to get started with. To create your own resume using this template go to File → “Make a Copy”
We have decided to provide a Google Doc template as opposed to a latex or Microsoft Word template because of the following reasons:
Please see our Cornell Engineering Resume Template; feel free copy this Google Doc and adapt it as a starting point for your resume!
While we did not focus on LaTeX resume templates they can still be a good starting point for a more customized resume that can show off technical ability. Below are some quick suggestions of LaTeX templates: